Arts & Events

Promising “more song-and-dance than a Bush Administration press conference,” the San Francisco Mime Troupe will be Making a Killing this weekend, for free, at Cedar Rose Park, a block from Cedar and Chestnut Streets.
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It has been 35 years since the Berkeley Museum brought New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Sculpture of Matisse,” to the Bay Area. The current show as SFMOMA permits us to re-examine the great painter’s three-dimensional work. The museum’s press release speaks of his “sculptural masterpieces.”
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It’s a perverse world that lets the name of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami remain obscure to the vast Western film-going public. He is considered by many to among the three or four greatest artists in cinema today, the creative force behind some of the most thoughtful and compelling films of the past 25 years.
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Around the turn of the 20th century, Berkeley was promoted as a City of Homes. In 1905, the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, California published an illustrated booklet bearing this title and featuring various private residences. But the concept of home would soon change. The San Francisco earthquake and fire brought a flood of refugees into the East Bay, and many real-estate entrepreneurs quickly rolled up their sleeves to meet the housing demand.
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I’ve talked about a couple of ethical aspects of gardening over the past two weeks: ethical suppliers and basic kindness to plants, the reason I don’t buy Arizona desert species for my shady, poorly drained Berkeley garden.
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Tuesday’s review of Crowded Fire Theater Company’s Anna Bella Eema at Ashby Stage mistakenly attributed last year’s production of The Typographer’s Dream to Crowded Fire. The play was actually produced by Encore Theatre and remounted at Ashby Stage in association with Shotgun Players.
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On a platform, three women sit, facing the audience. They don’t budge from their chairs until practically the end of the show, yet there’s a choreography, in Lisa D’Amour’s Anna Bella Eema, as directed by Rebecca Novick for Crowded Fire Theater Company at the Ashby Stage, and the three actors (Cassie Beck, Danielle Levin and Julie Kurtz) provide a rhythmic soundscape as well, with voice, simple musical instruments (a finger piano) and various ordinary objects as noisemakers.
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In today’s fully wired world of digital video and handheld viewing devices, it may be difficult to fathom a time when the moving picture was itself a revolutionary technology. In the first few decades of the 20th century, as the new medium was developed and perfected, it brought with it a radical cultural shift, bringing images from all over the world to neighborhood theaters.
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It isn’t always easy to keep a giant sequoia / Big Tree / Sequoiadendron giganteum thriving down here near sea level. (It isn’t always easy even to talk about the species without someone’s caviling about whatever common name is current.) I’ve known at least two that were cut down locally, and one that just doesn’t look happy. There’s a nice row of them along the main road through Tilden Park, though, just past the regional Parks Botanic Garden, for easy viewing as you pass. You can get up close and personal with the species in the Bot Garden too, and reassure yourself about identification—they’re labeled—and compare them with coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens.
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